Legionnaires and Viet Minh regulars were soon mixed in hand-to-hand combat, limiting French artillery fire to Viet Minh reinforcements moving in from the north and southwest. Regiment 66’s attack was beaten back, but they remained heavily entrenched on Quarry Heights. When it became clear that he could not take Quarry Heights before nightfall, de Rocquigny opted to pull his forces back while casualties were still light and prepare for a counterattack. He had lost some five killed and 33 wounded for an estimated 800 Viet Minh casualties. Colonel Gilles, commanding the sector, ordered his own troops to conduct a relief in place with de Rocquigny’s paratroops while he received Mobile Group 1 and the 2/1st Algerian Tirailleurs as reinforcements to conduct a larger-scale attack to seize and hold the area around Quarry Heights.

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Operation Melinite, on January 28 and 29, managed to do just that. The 2/1st Algerians took Quarry Heights, while the 4/7th RTA reached the Ba Xet spur. The 4/7th RTA was thrown back from the spur by a determined Viet Minh counterattack, but the 2/1st Algerians held on to Quarry Heights despite the best efforts of a battalion from Regiment 9. Control of Quarry Heights should have given the French tactical control of Colonial Route 6. But while French engineers and infantry set to work clearing trees and brush from both sides of the highway, Giap was repositioning his forces for a new series of attacks against French positions.

On January 30, 1952, the Viet Minh went back on the offensive throughout the Colonial Route 6 sector. Fighting was heaviest at Suc Sich, where two battalions tried to overrun the 16th Company of the 8th Colonial Paratroops. At a cost of four paratroops killed and 17 wounded, the colonial paras killed 101 Viet Minh and captured 14 others before driving off the remainder. Once again, French artillery and close air support had proved crucial.

Although the French now controlled Colonial Route 6 and still held Hoa Binh, Salan was coming to the conclusion that the tail was wagging the dog. While the Black River was still nominally French, convoys could no longer use it, and it had taken 20 days of fighting to open 40 kilometers of Colonial Route 6. Worse, keeping the road open was costing far more than it was worth. True French control only extended from Hanoi as far as Xuan Mai. From Don Goi west to Hoa Binh, French outposts constituted a series of land islands in a hostile terrestrial sea. While the Viet Minh could not move through the French-controlled islands, they could still move around them, and manning those positions was tying down over 20,000 men. Had the Vietnamese army developed earlier, Salan might have had the manpower he required. But with the state of that fledgling army in 1952, he had to rely on legionnaires, paratroops, colonial infantry and North Africans. All this to keep a single line of communication open.

Colonial Route 4 had demonstrated the dangers of that situation, and Salan needed his elite troops for defense of the Tonkin Delta. When French Intelligence reported in mid-January that Giap had temporarily withdrawn the 304th, 308th and 312th divisions to undergo rest and refitting for an offensive against Hoa Binh and that the 316th and 320th divisions were infiltrating the Red River delta, Salan decided to cut his losses and withdraw. On February 5, 1952, he ordered his staff to prepare a plan for the evacuation of Hoa Binh, which was accomplished between February 14 and 25, 1952.

From November 10, 1951, until February 25, 1952, Hoa Binh cost French Union forces 436 killed, 458 missing in action, and 2,060 wounded. The Viet Minh lost 3,455 killed, 307 taken prisoner and more than 7,000 wounded. Both sides would lose more casualties in later battles, but Hoa Binh was the watershed of the First Indochina War. Like American commanders who came after them, the French had laid out a series of actions whose accomplishment went more or less according to plan. And yet Hoa Binh had been a defeat. The French had set out to go on the offensive, but ended up on the defensive. They had intended to draw the Viet Minh into a fight on their terms, yet ended up by having to fight them on theirs. Despite the heavy casualties inflicted, the Viet Minh kept coming back for more. French tactical successes were in no small part due to the close proximity support.

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